The Night Bell
by MissingEden
Summary: --Oneshot--Absence makes the heart grow fonder...and sometimes keeps it from growing at all. Sirius/Remus.


**Disclaimer:** Sorry, my New Year's Resolution to starting owning Harry Potter hasn't taken effect yet.

_(a/n: __Yay__! Random one shot!_

_Boo! Random _emo_ one shot. Aw…lame._

_I __came up with__ this__ while answering reviews (if I didn't happen to send a response to yours, don't worry, it's just because I'm stupid and thought I did), in particular one from mumimeanjudy. I started __considering__ the __suckiness__ of __Remus'__s__ short life and __this sort of vomited itself out of my brain and into my word processer. And now you, dear readers, shall be the weird janitor's sawdust to that vomit, and…soak it up…accordingly…I'm sorry. That image was fucking disgusting. I really need to work on my metaphors…_

_Yeah, I'm not setting the mood here at all, am I?_

_Anyway__, you can thank the aforementioned reader for the inspiration (or yell at them for it, because if it sucks it's __all their__ fault)__ while I go off and watch the Twilight Z__one for the next forty-eight__ hours.__ 'Cause that's ho__w cool people spend New Year__'s__ Eve)_

_

* * *

_

"A false ring of the night bell, once answered—it can never be made right." 

_—Franz Kafka_

_

* * *

_Remus Lupin swilled a mouthful of his third glass of wine plaintively and stared down at the carpet. 

_Ring._

He was late. Again. Tonight, of all nights, and knowing full well he wasn't safe, the damned idiot had gone off by himself.

_Ring._

"He promised not to do this." He said it aloud though there was no one to hear. "He promised me."

_Ring._

It was a lie; he knew that. He'd heard the falseness in his voice that night, Lily and James dead and him swearing up and down he wouldn't do anything to end up the same.

_Ring._

A sharp pain flashed through his palm, and he looked without feeling down at the broken glass stained with a mixture of wine and blood of the same shade.

_Ring._

_That damn liar._

_Ring._

He'd known. Somehow he'd known. He could feel it, the hurried finality of his touch, the way every kiss felt like an apology, and most of all how not one second of that night had been spent looking at one another.

_Ring._

They'd made love without their eyes meeting once, and every moment seemed to indicate this was the last time they ever would.

_Ring._

It wasn't as though he hadn't heard them, the people who came. People who called themselves his friends and yet were there to tell him that Sirius, his Sirius, was a murderer.

_Ring_

He'd heard them through the door

_Ring_

They'd rung the bell for hours.

_Ring. _

He wouldn't let them in. If they wanted to make up idiot stories, they could do it on the front steps.

_Ring._

He hadn't opened the door once in six days, because not once in six days had a dark shaggy man or a dog of the same description been on the other side of it.

_Ring._

He lifted his napkin from his lap, placed it with careful dignity next to his plate of ice-cold, untouched food, and stood up.

_Ring_

_When Sirius comes back, we are buying a quieter doorbell._

_Ring._

_Ring_

_Ri—_

"Yes?"

"Remus! I was starting to think you'd gone out."

"I haven't."

"Well, that's sort of why I'm here…no one's heard from you in a week. I know you're having a rough time of it—"

"I'm fine. You shouldn't have left the children over this."

"They'll be all right, Molly's there..." There was the same lengthy, pitying pause he was hearing so often of late. "Remus…well, Molly's making dinner about now, you know we've always got a place for you if you want it—"

"That's very kind of you, Arthur." He smiled weakly. "But I think I'll wait for Sirius, if that's all right. It's our anniversary tonight."

He closed the door. He disconnected the doorbell.

And when Sirius got home, he thought, he was sleeping on the couch.

_

* * *

(a further a/n: Okay, so if your primary experience with my writing was "A Song of Modern Love", you are probably operating in total WTF-mode right now. Hey, I can be serious! No really, I can! _

_…like…sometimes…if I try really hard…_

_But jokes aside, a lot of this fic came from very serious places. Watching a documentary on the Iraq war last year, I was very struck by the idea of mothers who refused to open the door to the officers who came to tell them their children had been killed in action, as if keeping it shut meant none of it was really happening. __My mom says it's incredibly sick and disturbing of me to use such an idea to write slash, and if any of you agree with her, I'm really really sorry. It's just that I'm a terribly person who draws inspiration from places I probably shouldn't and I can't help it._

_At any rate, I'm still trying to learn the art of writing with actual emotion, and denial always seemed to me to be the saddest stage of the grieving process. Assuming the grieving process can be applied to people who aren't actually dead. Which as of now it can._

_Other notes:_

_Yes, this is teeny. I know this because I wrote it, you see._

_I'm sorry about all the onomatopoeia. It seemed to make some sort of sense at the time._

_Please ignore the big fuck-off plot hole of Arthur showing up at Remus's house even though canon-wise they probably didn't even know each other at that point in time. But jeez, canon-wise Remus is a married heterosexual, so give me a break with this, okay?_

_And no, this does not mean I have given up on HarryxDraco. I just took a twenty minute break from it and wrote this out of boredom. Which would be why it sucks._

_Other than that, well…_

_There you have it, for better or for worse: more tragic slash from K-san and the Paranoid Android._

_We're sorry._

_P.S._

_I think that author's note was longer than the actual story. How sad._

_P.P.S._

_Do wizards even have doorbells?)_


End file.
